I know Bill Caldwell. Worked for him. He convinced me, unintentionally I’m sure, to leave the Army. I know nothing about what he did, didn’t, should, or shouldn’t have done with all this stuff in the paper. But my personal opinion, FWIW, is that he’s not above suspicion and should not get the benefit of the doubt.

Shit, Rick, I do illegal searches all the time.

I debated on posting this, but there are people I know who are solidly upstanding, courageous men, full of character and good hearts. They have been in actual harm’s way for longer than I was even in the peacetime Army. Those men deserve our support and gratitude every day.

At the 3-star general level, maybe it’s no longer about moral courage, character, and choosing the hard right over the easy wrong; maybe it’s about politics just like it is when a congressman posts on Craigslist: you screw up and get caught, you’re out.

Sometimes the WSJ depresses me. I read it for sensible, no BS news and financial analysis, and then their opinion page goes off the deep end with this sort of crap.

I almost don’t want to link to this — it’s that embarrassing to the author in my opinion, but some guy whose Army time criss-crossed mine wrote an opinion piece saying that there should be no women in Ranger School.

Well, I’ve always thought this view was dead-ass wrong. He collapses a whole lot of assumptions inside his argument — that physical standards will go down, for example — and makes other arguments that have nothing to do with the real issue for him or for female soldiers. If standards go down, that’s the problem, not the women. There certainly are people who think that the standards went down between the time many of my peers went, early 90s, and me in 1993 — there was no live fire in Utah in my class. Since then, of course, Ranger School has dropped a phase, and might even be shorter in terms of days. I don’t really know — and it doesn’t matter because that’s not the point. The point is that there is someone making decisions about the course whose job it is to improve the training and selection of young leaders. It’s that person’s job (and the RI’s) to maintain the standards, not those people talking about the golden age of Ranger School.

My Army was a meritorious one. We tried really damn hard to focus on whether a solder could do the job, not the color of his skin, the personal equipment hidden inside her underwear, the language he spoke at home, or even, frankly, the passport she carried.

Some soldiers belong in Ranger School. Others don’t. The criteria we use are not in any way automatically linked to having a penis, even if strength is typically correlated with the testosterone that accompanies having a willy. There’s a world of difference in quality among the males in Ranger School, too, let’s not forget. Can you compare a bat boy E-3 to an O-3 Navy seal? Those guys are worlds apart in skill, will, and future promise. But both were part of my platoon and worked their asses off. Can you compare a white warrant officer helicopter pilot with a black infantry lieutenant with an asian commo officer? No, even then we knew that was a distinction without a difference. Two made it, one didn’t — that’s the only difference anyone should care about.

There are women I knew in the Army, and certainly some I’ve met since, who absolutely have the physical stamina to survive Ranger School (yes, an Ironman is only 17 hours, but there’s a whole lot of training and dedication that can’t really be separated from the race itself). Mental stamina? I don’t think anyone can argue that out of all the women who’ve already decided to join the Army, there’s no chance that any of them could tough it out.

This article embarrasses me — it’s one more stupid-ass stereotype that I have to fight as a former soldier, Infantry officer, and proud recipient of MY Ranger Tab, Class 9-93.

Fuck this guy. If I ended up in battle, hell yeah, I’d want someone wearing a tab next to me. I’d look there long before I tried to peek in someone’s underpants.

Ever feel like the deck was stacked against you, that your boss or wife or boyfriend had somehow made it impossible for you to succeed?

In the Army, we called that being set up for failure. It sprouted from poor planning, from shirking responsibility, from deliberately withholding resources. (Some might say at this point that the President’s refusal to authorize AC-130 gunships significantly contributed to the tragic loss of life recounted in the movie “Black Hawk Down,” having set the US forces up for failure by holding back.)

But there’s something you can do once you learn what the short end of the stick feels like: you can set people up for success.

At some point, and I’m not sure I can remember why, I started subscribing to Scott Ginsberg’s blog. About now, you’re thinking “Who?” Scott. The Nametag Guy? Oh, now you remember. *That* you’ve seen.

Anyways, he writes some good stuff. My personal opinion is that there’s a lot of chaff in the wheat, if I can deconstruct that metaphor.

I can generally do without the too-clever turns of phrase, and the rehashes of the same sayings in three or four different blog posts.

But.

There has to be a but, right? But, sometimes he comes out with really great, great stuff. Actually profound and meaningful instead of just rambling and space-filling noisemaking.

This definition of “thought leader” is by far the best thing I’ve seen from him. It’s just great.

So short and sweet that it’s like a nine-word poem:

A trusted source who moves people with innovative ideas.

He breaks out the six key themes (trusted, source, moves, people, innovative, ideas) and distills his message down to just a sentence or two. It’s really that good.

So, of course, I’m going to create the entirely opposite effect and write six separate posts, one on each of these themes, to dig deeper into discovering and communicating, living and expressing, your (and mine) thought leadership platform.

Trusted

Source

Moves

People

Innovative

Ideas

(I’ll link each post back here so you can get the full effect if you’re so inclined.)

What experience led you to recognize any of these traits in yourself? What did you do to clarify your message on one of these themes?

Can you share an experience in which you saw the benefit of one of these traits or the harm from its absence?

… Harvard’s Charles Czeisler. He notes that going without sleep for 24 hours or getting only five hours of sleep a night for a week is the equivalent of a blood alcohol level of 0.1 percent. Yet modern business ethic celebrates such feats. “We would never say, ‘This person is a great worker! He’s drunk all the time!’ ” Czeisler wrote in a 2006 Harvard Business Review article.

This finding matches up with what we’ve discussed about doctors. The problem gets hidden inside the data in the business world because the harsh measurements of death is absent; no one knows what would have happened to the Murphy account if the saleswoman had more rest. Plus, we don’t like to think about how lack of sleep impairs us.

The story I tell about lack of sleep is, of course, one from Ranger School. I think it was the last patrol in Florida phase, and I was the squad leader for a nighttime linear ambush. One of my team leaders was trying to tell me something, and he was literally falling asleep standing up, while he was talking to me. He’d drift off, stumble forward a step, catch himself, wake up, and keep talking. Amazingly I remember being wide awake at the time, and asking the RI about what you might do in just this situation. He basically said “you have to do whatever you can, because sleeping means dying.” Okay, he didn’t say the last couple words, but that lesson doesn’t have to be learned in today’s Army, not since Vietnam.

How might we put these ideas into practice? For one, if leaders delegated more fully to teams, then each team could function independently with the same task, conditions, and standards as the others (three sales teams covering the same region, for example). Let each team leader decide how to manage and lead her people. If the results are what matter, then let the results speak. Senior people shouldn’t get hung up on optics, particularly if the only reason is because it’s easier to count hours in the office than measure sales effectiveness or adjust for the quality of the leads.

So give your teams intentions-based guidance. Let the lowest-level leader decide how they’ll operate (in terms of schedule, responsiveness, mindset), and let the results speak for themselves once you gather enough data to smoke out the externalities that tough working conditions can create.

What is your number one fallback technique for taking care of your subordinates?

Of course, they’re pretty much all useful and accurate. I mean, it’s hard to write a “tip” that is flat-out wrong. But I was thinking about it more in the sense of why, in 2010, do high-profile people with things to say get caught up in “email tips” or other minutiae of their fields?

For Seth, email is no more specially relevant (in the sense it’s discussed here) than it is for pretty much anyone. (He does have special things to say about marketing emails to customers and how to dance the tango with that one; but that’s really about marketing, not email.) For Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, the basic, undergrad level stuff about finance that he’s been posting as “MBA Mondays” is far below the level at which he’s presumably operating (assumption based on: Wharton MBA, co-founder Flatiron Partners, investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Etsy, Meetup, Return Path, Del.icio.us, Feedburner).

So two questions: first, why don’t we know how to use email yet? Is it really just that everyone my parents’ age is emailing all the time now? Really? For work? They’re in their early 60s. I don’t think there are many folks that age just starting to use email in the workplace, but I could be wrong. Show me, and I’ll believe it.

What should experts write about?

Second, if you’re a hotshot guru, if you’re an actual expert at something, even if that’s being an expert in communicating about something that seems mundane or even unimportant or at least non-mystical to many people (Blogs about wine? Gardening? Cooking? With a waffle iron?), what would drive you to spend time on these types of seemingly low-value questions? Is it just about sharing what’s free?

I thought recently about why I answer basic questions in my field — it’s because my clients are not experts in the field and these seemingly basic questions are not basic for them. So it’s my belief that these readers get value disproportionate (hopefully in their favor!) to my cost to provide it. It gives them a chance to learn about my way of approaching problems, a sense of my depth of of knowledge on the real issues, and maybe even an introduction to me when we wouldn’t have met otherwise. So sure, the Five-Minute General Counsel series is marketing. But it provides value because it’s me talking about topics on which I am an expert.

I am worried about the viability of my potential client base, however, if the pool of startup candidates for Fred’s attention are so far down the learning curve in terms of business planning that they don’t understand discount rates, CAGR, or the law of large numbers. Conveniently for many of them, I’m well-versed in finance too. Financial models and ranger-level attention to detail? Match made in heaven (twice).

Front-line management (which is the starting point for most leadership development) has had its share of tips from me, which I think of as different, but maybe that’s not true. And I’ve written about email and productivity too. Part of the productivity dance is sharing what works for me, a version of the mobile professional: I’m a lawyer and strategic advisor who works with relatively small teams on any particular engagement or matter. My advice is (not the same as having 75+ people working on a software beta launch).

Email tips? Really?

So back to the main point: really, do we still need email tips? Even people of my generation (early 40s, or what I like to call “mid-30s”) who didn’t see email commonly until after college (for me, it was law school in 1994 at Cornell that introduced email as a common tool), have still had 15+ years of experience with email.

If we keep working at this level, if we don’t expect some kind of improvement, we’re going to be telling people every year for the next 50 years about how to write emails, how to read email, and how to save money for retirement.

We can’t have our smartest guides, our best communicators, teaching remedial classes. Not if we want to make any progress.

This WSJ editorial reprint of an earlier article by Milton Friedman describes the shift in doctor-patient relationships as a result of managed care companies hiring doctors to provide medical services.

I briefly commented on this on my Observations page in relation to a suggestion that we need to allow non-lawyer ownership of “law firms” to bring down legal costs. Separate from the misguided proposal of having non-lawyers doing legal work (which is like having lawyers doing surgery), there is a notion that third-party ownership of professionals would improve things. As I noted in that short post:

Fee-sharing: the relevant question here is how/why we accept the notion of doctors sharing medical fees with non-doctors not bound by ethical rules. It seems to me that either we lawyers follow in the footsteps of doctors, or the doctors got it wrong and should be shaking off the HMOs and insurance companies.

What struck me about the Friedman so quickly that I had to stop and write this (writing this, I still actually haven’t made it past the phrase “doctors and patients as enemies”) was the depiction of the doctor and patient as opponents in the cost containment battle rather than as a united front against disease.

A comparison is in order:

I don’t think many of my learned liberal friends (and yes, that, just like “learned conservative” isn’t always an oxymoron) would very much like the idea of a lawyer who had substantial other interests to protect. There are references to this in Guantanamo detainees distrusting the incredibly liberal and supportive lawyers trying to defend them (and perhaps breaking the law in the process): the detainees distrust the system so much that they doubt any part of it could be on their side.

In our legal system, prosecutors have a special ethical duty, singled out for them, to find truth. Their job is explicitly NOT to convict someone for a crime. Defense lawyers have no such obligation to find justice. We expect that the people working for us, particularly professionals who have these special skills, special privileges, AND special obligations to society, to be on our team 100% of the time.

If HMOs put doctors at odds with patients, what would corporate legal service providers do? Eliminate discovery? Substitute their judgment on accepting a settlement? Plaintiffs’ lawyers working on contingency already handle many of these issues when the client in charge of the litigation doesn’t bear the costs of maintaining it. In most cases, lawyers “guide” their clients in reasonable directions, and usually lawyers can withdraw if things become untenable (thus almost certainly forfeiting economic claims for whatever work is done or value created). The moral hazard of separating responsibility for payment and authority for expenses is too great for any field to bear for long (except Congress, where it can last for decades in some cases until voters wake up).

The stated rationale for no fee-sharing with non-lawyers is to preserve the lawyer’s independence in complying with ethical obligations and the representation of the client without the influence of a person who doesn’t have the same ethical obligations towards the client.

Tell me what you think: what is it about doctors?

Why do we trust them to abide by their ethical rules and oath but not lawyers?

Is it the underlying belief that science and test results will reveal bogus advice whereas lawyers can be more vague and un-catchable?

Or were the lawyers simply smart enough to see what happened to doctors’ practices?

What’s the relationship between these two professions and where did they diverge?

Is it just that we all expect to need healthcare? Why not use vouchers like with charter schools? (Oops, didn’t mean to stir up that debate!)

When discussing the recent presidential campaign with two professors I know, one asked me who was more “favorable” when it came to autism. He assumed that I would probably support the Democrats because of their association with support of civil rights (IDEA and the ADA are civil rights statutes at their heart).

As I continued to consider that query and followed the debates and politicians’ jockeying around support of various autism legislation, I developed an idea for a political information website that recognized the primacy of autism in my life and the lives of so many families and extended families like ours. Do I vote Democrat? Do I vote Republican? No, “I vote Autism.”

I guess I’ve become a single-issue voter. And, at least for now, I see it as critical when confronting the actions and policies of other interest groups: doctors, teachers, auto union workers, post office employees, and frankly anyone else. It’s not any less legitimate for me, and every autism Dad and Mom, to speak for our children in the same voice as everyone else speaks for themselves.

I recently saw an article with some tips on writing blog posts more quickly. They were all decent tips, but one caught my eye as being either completely misguided or crazy like a fox. Tim Scullin wrote:

Outsource Your Posts

Currently I write all my posts because I am very interested in my topic. However if you can’t keep up or are just not interested in writing about your topic anymore then outsourcing your posts could be a great opportunity for you. You can get quality posts from English speaking writers for as little as $10 a post. Make sure you test out your writers skills before you pay and even then only pay for a few posts at first. If you find their style is horrible or doesn’t fit with your target audience then you can change.

Now, I write all these words with an occasional advance read-through of topics on “Simplifying Complexity.” Blogging is about conversation. It’s about voice, your voice and my voice. We can’t discuss issues, I can’t present information, if you can’t trust that they’re even my words.

Well, some people can. They’re called companies. To me, the only time when “outsourcing” the writing makes any sense is when you are merely putting up blog posts to sell stuff or to create an apparent mountain of content too hard for a DIY competitor to climb. And that’s a race to the bottom.

Outsourcing blog posts is not much different than celebrity ghost-written twittering, or gwittering (that’s ghost-twittering, and yes, I just made it up; TwitterProxy seems like the right word for Obama’s folks – see below). A fellow in the NYT article complains that it’s okay to “ghostwrite” for brands but not for celebrities who are brands. It’s simple — one is sending updates about X using twitter and the other is X sending updates.

For example, we had a PR firm pitch ThoughtStorm, and while we liked their PR activity proposals, the offer to create social network profiles, updates, and so on was definitely a slippery slope for us. Now it’s easier for us to draw a line because we know that there are few people who could create actual content related to what we do as opposed to posting news-ish updates and links to other people’s writings. And we would have simply identified these sorts of updates by labeling them as from a different user/team rather than from me or my partner.

Finally, although I’m unlikely to use the President as an example in many circumstances (and the stories seem to indicate that Obama’s tweets are indeed ghost-written), the Whitehouse blog doesn’t claim to be written by him, when it could be. Any President adopts the words of speechwriters, and there are those heads of state who control their own messages (Churchill is a personal favorite of mine in this regard).

If Winston Churchill could find the time to write his own speeches during WWII, you can respect your audience enough to find the time to write your own blog posts. If you can’t write all the time, just write better when you do.

So, you tell me: Is Tim giving misguided advice, or does he secretly know that only the “inauthentic” will use this tool, get presumably less interesting copy, and thereby cease being in actual or potential competition with so-called “real bloggers?” Or to make a more pointed question: would you be upset if you found out that your favorite blogger was faking it?

I recently came across this quote and have been upset about not getting it posted sooner. It just oozes character.

An excess of parental attention may build self-esteem, which is useless, at the expense of self-reliance, which is gold.

Hugh O’Neill in “The Seven Dadly Sins” in Best Life magazine, April 2008, p. 81.

I think that trying to explain what is, at its heart, a clear and simple expression of Emerson’s philosophy would ruin it.

I will however note that the lesson holds true for employees as well as children. We have seen, but not critically evaluated, numerous articles that reference Gen Y as being very demanding for affirmation and opportunity, often without responsibility or performance. Maybe this explains it.